10 January 2013

The world's population could decline

[t]he rate of global population
growth has slowed. And it’s expected to keep slowing. Indeed, according
to experts’ best estimates, the total population of Earth will stop
growing within the lifespan of people alive today.

And then it will fall.

This is a counterintuitive notion in the United States, where we’ve
heard often and loudly that world population growth is a perilous and
perhaps unavoidable threat to our future as a species. But population
decline is a very familiar concept in the rest of the developed world,
where fertility has long since fallen far below the 2.1 live births per
woman required to maintain population equilibrium...

American media have largely ignored the issue of population decline for
the simple reason that it hasn’t happened here yet. Unlike Europe, the
United States has long been the beneficiary of robust immigration. This
has helped us not only by directly bolstering the number of people
calling the United States home but also by propping up the birthrate,
since immigrant women tend to produce far more children than the
native-born do...

Moreover, the poor, highly fertile countries that once churned out
immigrants by the boatload are now experiencing birthrate declines of
their own. From 1960 to 2009, Mexico’s fertility rate tumbled from 7.3 live births per woman to 2.4, India’s dropped from six to 2.5, and Brazil’s
fell from 6.15 to 1.9. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average
birthrate remains a relatively blistering 4.66, fertility is projected to fall below replacement level
by the 2070s. This change in developing countries will affect not only
the U.S. population, of course, but eventually the world’s...

According to a 2008 IIASA report,
if the world stabilizes at a total fertility rate of 1.5—where Europe
is today—then by 2200 the global population will fall to half of what it
is today. By 2300, it’ll barely scratch 1 billion. [it's currently 7 billion]

Too bad so many of our nations tax policies, social policies, and economics depend on a large number of younger people. Maybe the lower population earthlings of the year 2200 will be better educated so it will not matter so much.

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